Insurgent Philosophy and the Real by A. Shahid Stover

The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#10, DEC/2013-FEB/2014

Philosophy is often reduced to a mere discipline amongst other academic disciplines, a neatly polished rhetorical exercise towards continually revisiting the systematic certainty of completely developed ‘fixed’ formulae through a discursive showcase of redundant truths, ready-made questions and the sedentary logic of positivism. However, the analytical quest for clarity of thought through pedestrian language betrays a false nobility that veils the very objectivity it lauds with a fetish of myth posturing as rhetorical transparency within which reside the seeds of epistemic closure as performative harmony with the Real.

Insurgent philosophy moves discursively from its genesis in the Raw of coloniality towards interrogations of the Real that confront the normative gaze of western imperialist power by resisting the biopolitical pacification of human ‘being’. For the Real constantly acquaints human ‘being’ with the possibility of abdicating human subjectivity in exchange for an epistemologically sanctioned ‘objecthood’ characterized as a substantive ‘empirical self-as-rational animality’. However, insurgent philosophical endeavor calls into question the nature of this ossification of situated consciousness into ‘objecthood’, and aids in enunciating Revolt towards inciting openings of human ‘being’ as lived rhythm of praxis towards human subjectivity necessitated through a decision of spiritual upheaval against the menacing gravity of overdetermination-from-without by established power.

Insurgent philosophy thus constitutes an emancipatory ontological wager of human ‘being’ originating as a discursive response to the disaster of coloniality in the Raw that situates the singularity of lived Black experience as an exceptional antagonism within modernity as imposed by western imperialist power. As such, philosophy at an insurgent register interrogates the Real and enunciates Revolt against Empire with critical conceptual interpretations that exert a discursive emancipatory pressure upon the normative gaze towards potentialities of introducing epistemological ruptures; thus breaching a coercive anonymity of biopolitical pacification against human ‘being’ that inscribes modernity with a structural-inert violence that weighs upon Black subjectivity with an intense socio-ontological severity and unprecedented historical imperative towards the Universal.

No doubt, for thought to assert an objective philosophical posture in relation to the hegemony of Empire, not only endorses socio-ontological retreat from confronting the Raw of coloniality that situates valid attempts at epistemological opposition within a dogmatic regurgitation of established structures of meaning and a sanctioned renewal of conventional wisdom, but ultimately revalidates a replication of discursive fidelity to the normative gaze of western imperialist power.

Insurgent philosophical endeavor draws its epistemological sustenance from the Raw, an intense proximity of lived experience that unchains emancipatory potentialities of thought from discursive fidelity to the Real of western imperialist power as obscured under the dim lights of epistemic closure through logical positivist analysis and poststructuralist sophistry.

Oppositional philosophy, regardless of whether in concert with continental or analytical traditions, by deriving fundamental epistemological precepts and core teleological conclusions from modernity itself, ultimately reproduces a western imperialist continuum even while challenging its contemporary guise of advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization with socialist or communist variants. Whereas insurgent philosophy, by choosing to begin in the intensity of disaster as racist dehumanization and coloniality in the Raw that structurally positions an imperial mainstream-as-civil society at the lived expense of a socio-ontological underground of modernity in its wake, confronts Empire with an emancipatory universality of constitutive potentialities of human ‘being’ and human liberation which undermine a western imperialist continuum by destabilizing the very conditions of its possibility.